66% of Ghanaians living with HIV are women – Nat’l AIDS Control Programme

Programme Manager for the National AIDS/STI Control Programme, Dr Stephen Ayisi Addo has revealed that out of 346,120 persons living with HIV, sixty-six per cent of that number are women.

He explained that aside from this, eight per cent of that number are children. Dr Addo noted that in most of these cases, there is the mother-child transmission of the virus.

He made this known during an interview with Samuel Eshun on the Happy Morning Show aired on e.TV Ghana and Happy 98.9FM.

“HIV/Aids is a serious issue. From the statistics we have, if you narrow it to Ghana, out of a total of 38 million infected with HIV worldwide, 346,120 people in Ghana are infected with HIV Aids. Sixty-Six per cent (66%) of this number are women, while eight per cent (8%) are children. We are still seeing HIV transmission from mother to child either because the mother didn’t take her drugs or the mother wasn’t tested as at the time of the pregnancy”.

He added that out of one hundred pregnant women who visit the hospital, two test positive for HIV/Aids.

HIV continues to be a major global public health issue. In 2019 an estimated 38 million people were living with HIV (including 1.8 million children), with a global HIV prevalence of 0.7% among adults. Around 19% of these people (7.1 million) do not know that they have the virus.

Since the start of the epidemic, an estimated 75.7 million people have become infected with HIV and 32.7 million people have died of AIDS-related illnesses.

In 2019, 690,000 people died of AIDS-related illnesses. This number has reduced by around 40% since the peak of 1.7 million in 2004 and 1.4 million in 2010.